Evolution of Services Marketing Research: The Technological Era

The purpose of this paper is to review and report the literature evolution of services marketing (SM) discipline during the period 2000 – 2009, or as we will call it in this paper “The Technological Era”. As most appropriate to the purpose of the study, content analysis has been used as the method of research. Using the technique of content analysis, the research focuses on correlation of the 418 articles/papers that have been reviewed thoroughly from 107 academic journals, according to the different classes of services, the research topics of SM, the methods and techniques of conducting research and the annual yield of published papers over the last decade.

Research was based on the results that were given by 2 major search engines – Emerald and Scirus – that specialize in scientific research and return publications from large electronic databases. The authors have been cautious in ensuring that the number of research papers being examined is not a small portion or sample of the published population, but actually the maximum number of publications of the available electronic databases. However, it cannot be claimed that all existing publications have been studied without a doubt.

The present research paper aims in serving as a reference tool for the services marketing academia. It shows which the priorities of the SM research community are, concerning the SM research areas. It can also be supported that quantitative methods and techniques are used very widely lately, when most research in the near past was conducted with the use of qualitative techniques alone.